The Netflix Detox

On this wind-and-snow battered Saturday morning when I (and the whole of the Northeast) woke up to a moving wall of white outside our windows, I ended my subscription to Netflix. There was a moment's temptation to perhaps defer this to a working day or one with more clement weather, to submit to another winter weekend of huddling on the sofa and binge-watching; but we had decided - no more.

I had never watched much television before moving to the US. My family of seven had two televisions, and I usually lacked the motivation to negotiate TV time and watch a specific show on a specific day at a specific time. At the same time, I am quite choosy and wouldn't watch just anything that was playing when the TV was available. All this translated to under 2 hours of TV a week.

Netflix on the other hand is peculiarly suited to my passive, demotivated, and yet selective TV-watching behavior. It is easy; it is available; it has variety and even quality; it is in short, a movable feast. Twenty minutes can seamlessly morph into an hour or three on my dilapidated couch. It begins to replace all the things I actually want to do at home, whether quotidian (cleaning, cooking), necessary for health (exercise,sleep), or good for the soul (entertaining, writing, music, art).

Like Thoreau in 1845, I now wish to live deliberately. To use my leisure time with the same thought and dedication I give to my career. To truly do the things I want to do, and to live a life of quality.

It has been 14 hours since I suspended Netflix, and since then I have:

• Exercised for an hour
• Spoken with my family
• Spoken with friends
• Listened to Andrea Bocelli and Luciano Pavarotti
• Cleaned out my bookcase
• Cleaned out my "miscellaneous" storage unit
• Packed a box of things to donate
• Cooked a healthy lunch
• Entertained friends over home-cooked dinner
• Made music
• Played two board games
• Written this blog post, my first of 2016

The withdrawal pangs are going to hit, perhaps mid-week. But thus far, cold turkey has never looked so good.

Accented

My accent sums up my existence, a microcosm of my journey. It is an Indian accent, a Bombay accent. It is light, and fairly clean, but still a "non-native" version of English. Which is ironic, as English is essentially my native tongue, a language I spoke exclusively in school, and a language I spoke even at home, most of the time.

To an Indian listener, it spells out my background, in detail. It is an educated accent - that of cricket commentators, television journalists, and theater actors. 

It is flatly correct in its Indian-ness, lacking the clipped inflections of a British voice or the softer undulations of an American one. It carries the traces of many different mother tongues - parents', friends', teachers'.

It used to trace out British pronunciations in a subcontinental mold, but a few American ones have crept in. Schedules have become "skedjuls", and jewellery is now "jool-ry", but I still stumble over the pronounced O's of celebratory, circulatory, and respiratory. Some colloquialisms have altered as well - I stand in line (except on trips to India, where I look for the queue in vain), ride an elevator to my apartment rather than taking the lift to my parents' flat, and dine with silverware, not cutlery.

Nevertheless, my accent is still largely unchanged, and carries expressions and inflections unique not just to my city and country, but even specifically to my school. Put me with my school mates from fifteen years ago, and you will hear the sameness.

It also carries my own idiosyncrasies - words I learned from the printed page that I mispronounce, words I did finally learn that sound too rehearsed, little interjections from long-forgotten friends that entered my lexicon and stuck there.

I will never deliberately change my accent to match my surroundings, and I will not make my speech into an act of theater or mimicry. It is my truth, my story.

A Memorable Meal

Flying into Bombay from sub-zero New York, we stepped out of the airport terminal into our families' arms and felt the warm, moist air settle around us in a welcoming embrace. It was 1 AM, and there was still time for our back-home ritual.

My husband and I got into our respective parents' cars and drove south through the island city, to Santosh Sagar, a tiny, basic eatery near our Malabar hill home. Even at that hour, crowds of cars hovered as waiters rushed to take and fill orders, an Indian version of a drive-through. 

The irresistible aroma filled our nostrils and our mouths watered as we sat around a plastic table on the pavement, impatient in the gentle sea breeze until the waiters brought us our little steel plates, steaming hot.

All of us - two families, eight people - had the same order, pav bhaji. No home cook can achieve this dish, nor can a fancy chef. It belongs to the streets of Bombay. The bhaji is spicy, buttery and tangy - a chunky mix of tomatoes, legumes and vegetables, mashed and cooked on a giant griddle. It is served with a side of lime and a slab of pav, a cushiony white bread that is saturated to its pores with salty, rich, yellow butter and toasted in the juices of the bhaji. 

We squeezed lime into the bhaji and broke bread together, spooning bhaji over the pav and eating with our hands, savoring the complex, robust flavors of our city as they burst harmoniously in our mouths, over and over again.

Grocery Shopping - Load/Unload

1. Load items into shopping cart
2. Unload onto checkout counter
3. Load bags into shopping cart
4. Unload into trunk of car
5. Load bags into shopping cart, wheel upstairs
6. Unload onto kitchen floor
7. Sort items into refrigerator/cabinets
8. Collapse - you are done until next week

An excellent Indian murder mystery

Bad weather is a time for good books, and this weekend I read a murder mystery featuring a portly Punjabi detective, Vish Puri. The Case of the Missing Servant unfolds in Delhi, Gurgaon and NOIDA with side trips to Mehrauli "farmhouses" and to the Pink City.

I read it straight through in a single afternoon, and it was neither immediately obvious nor deliberately obscure, thus passing my basic tests for a well-written and well-paced murder mystery.

I also liked the fact that it was deeply Indian in its setting, characters and motivations, diving smoothly and intimately into the complexities and contrasts of life in New Delhi. Very often when people write about India, they are either dark, harsh and judgmental, or else they tend to sugarcoat. In this case, I thought the portrayal was authentic without being depressing, a realistic portrayal by an Indian author. In fact, reading the book, I would never have thought the author looked like this!

Tarquin Hall, featured nowhere in the book, is half-British, half-American and lives in New Delhi with his Indian-born wife. In the writing of this book, he seems to have adopted at least temporarily and with remarkable accuracy Indian attitudes, stereotypes, slang, beliefs and value systems.

Vish Puri, the central character, a Punjabi Sherlock Holmes and admirer of Chanakya, is slightly cocky like all great fictional detectives, and dreams of being portrayed by actor Anupam Kher in a possible Bollywood biopic of his life. As he negotiates the twists and turns of a sensational murder case, Hall explores life in North India - the web of relationships between the classes and the masses, the dirty nature of the construction business, the locus of power among politicians, businessmen, bureaucracy and judiciary, and corruption at every layer of society.

He does all this, however, while remaining matter-of-fact, almost cheerful, and without altering the entertaining pace. The tone is never bitter, and never without hope - the warmth and humanity of Vish Puri permeates this excellent page turner like the aroma of fresh paranthas.

(Check out the Guardian UK's review here)

I didn't think this winter could actually delight me

And it hasn't, for the most part. But last week, following a spell of freezing rain, the weather gods decided to treat me to a Winter Wonderland.

This translates to every single bare tree and shrub being sheathed in transparent, sparkling ice on a clear sunny day, transforming a regular old suburb into a Swarovski crystal forest.

As I snapped away, hands hurting in the cold, eyes dazzled with the glory all around me, I reflected that Walt Disney himself couldn't have done it better.

 

Ice Scraper

You are in bed, half-asleep, the morning after a snow storm. Which storm? Who knows, they are all one icy blur in your  memory. As you hear the wife leaving, you read the Times on your phone, scrolling through the story today's weather "a day of slush between two snowstorms." Speaking of storms, the wife is kind of storming out, annoyed that you didn't fuel the car on the weekend before the storm.

As the apartment door slams shut, you can literally feel the peace settling back, pressing down like two stones on your eyelids. A few more minutes of sleep....

Your cellphone ringing is a rude awakening, her voice incoherent, muddled with frustration, rage, and... are those tears? It takes a few minutes to realize that not fueling the car was the least of your faults. That spot where you parked near the top of the garage was open, exposed to the snow storm, something you did not realize late on Saturday night when it was the only thing available. The back of the car, it seems, is opaque with a sheet of ice frozen hard - and she tried to scrape it off with the only tools she has, her fingers and a plastic bag. 

As you dress, you try to think of  a solution, considering you don't even own a shovel, let alone an ice scraper. Indoor parking so far has made you soft. Though its freezing outside, you know the temperature inside the car is rising with each interminable second as she gets more and more stressed about being late for work.

By the time you leave home, your phone is already ringing again, a sign that she has already driven down six levels and has been parked outside since a minute or two (though she sincerely believes it to be much, much longer).

The car looks crappy. You unleash your weapon in a tidal wave across the rear windshield and watch it clear like magic. Magic, or two bottles of microwaved hot water.

Now she has turned her back to you, and you know she half wants to smile or maybe even giggle. But with a long and potentially difficult drive before her, the frustration hasn't quite gone away yet, so she will hide her face. She hates being late.

You want to smile too, in triumph, but you haven't quite gotten over your annoyance at being blamed for not moving the car on a Sunday before a storm or not being aware that it was exposed to the elements. She could have moved it herself if she wanted to. So you remain stony-faced.

A few hours later, these pictures reach your inbox. 

"The drive was so horrid, but it's so beautiful here today!" reads the message.

It's not till evening that you tell her about the backup secret weapon you didn't even have to use - her favorite stainless steel spatula